I tried to register for it, but the system said no tickets were available. I sent in a note about that and got a response saying that ticket availability wasn't in the plans and that I was stupid for wanting one.

It turned into a beautiful thing. It's full of illustrations, plus photos of the authors and covers of the magazines the stories were printed in. It has the first use of the word "astronaut", the cover story of the issue of Astounding that is said to have ushered in the "golden age of science fiction, A.E. van Vogt's first published science fiction, a few other firsts, and five stories that are printed from cleaned up scans of the magazines. There are biographies of all the writers in the boo

I had to chew on this one for a little bit. When any of our "things" can be replaced with the press of a button, we'd probably adopt a cultural of (voluntarily) loose ownership. Where what we created for ourselves we would still say we own, but most of us would be willing to give away most kinds of things if someone asked. I wouldn't call that communism, I would call that one of the effects of a rising tide lifting all boats: an increasing generosity.

Now if you're talking about an abusive (i.e. controlling) state, where the people are deprived of all the replicator technology and it's only in the hands of the government for it to dole out the output of, then also assuming a near-infinite energy source to run and I guess be the raw material for these machines, you could say that that thorny issue with Leftist economics of "eventually running out of other people's money" would be overcome.

I guess in that sense it would "work".

p.s. An interesting (to me at least) thought just occurred: Mr. Roddenberry didn't swap Right-wing economics for Left-wing economics in his made-up universe, he did away with economics?

Besides perjuring himself in testimony to the congress, he's responsible for billions of counts of felony wiretaps against innocent people. That motherfucker belongs behind bars, not shooting his mouth off about how we should all make it easier for fascist scumbags to wipe their asses with the constitution.

I noticed this on Google News yesterday - checked a CentOS 7 box to find that yum had installed the patch overnight on 7/28 and systemd had restarted named for me. Good work, everybody. Make sure your updates are working.Oh, hai dollar-short Slashdot.

I own Apple stock. And have owned MSFT and Sony stock. How is this frivolous?

Beachfront shore protection - that's frivolous. Waste of time, too. Spends 95 percent of the funds on the richest 1 percent on land areas that will be under water by 2025 regardless. Better spent on Africa.

An anonymous reader writes: Most of us are looking forward to the advent of autonomous vehicles. Not only will they free up a lot of time to previously spent staring straight ahead at the bumper of the car in front of you, they'll also presumably make commuting a lot safer. While that's great news for the 30,000+ people who die in traffic accidents every year in the U.S., it may not be great news for insurance companies. Granted, they'll have to pay out a lot less money with the lower number of claims, but premiums will necessarily drop as well and the overall amount of money within the car insurance system will dwindle. Analysts are warning these companies that their business is going to shrink. It will be interesting to see if they adapt to the change, or cling desperately to an outdated business model like the entertainment industry did. "One opportunity for the industry could be selling more coverage to carmakers and other companies developing the automated features for cars.... When the technology fails, manufacturers could get stuck with big liabilities that they will want to cover by buying more insurance. There’s also a potential for cars to get hacked as they become more networked."Link to Original Source

Hey, the malaria vaccine that was proven safe and effective in the 90's just finally got out of UK regulatory hell last week. About a million kids a year die from malaria. In the time they were bickering about the typeface on the label about 330,000 kids died from malaria. But we need that kind of officiousness and palaces and such for "civility". Those kids weren't white anyway.

Now it goes WHO regulatory hell, but if we're "lucky" the bureaucrats there will only let a quarter million kids die while they get their paperwork in order.

Oh, but a rival gang leader kill three hundred kids in Africa and Twitter loses its shit.